Free Fish in the Sky by Fridrik Erlings Page A

pointing two fingers at me with a glowing cigarette between them.
    “What took you so long?” Mom asks when I come into the kitchen.
    “There was a line at the fish store,” I say, and hand over the bag and the rest of the money.
    “Supper’ll be ready in a little while,” she says. “Tell Gertrude — I mean Trudy,” she corrects herself as she puts the fillet on the wooden board and starts slicing it up into equal pieces. The potatoes are boiling in a pot on the stove, and the steam is setting on the windows.
    I feel like a visitor in my own home. It’s Mom and Gertrude who live here; I’m just a delivery boy. Mom has changed since Gertrude arrived. It’s like everything is now done to please her, to let her have some peace in her room to study, let her sleep in on Sunday mornings. Mom would never order Gertrude to go to church with us. But it’s all right to order me to do all these things: go shopping, take out the garbage, peel the potatoes, vacuum the living room, fold the bedding with Mom, change the lightbulb in the hall because Mom gets dizzy if she has to stand on a chair, thread the needle when she’s sewing because sometimes her hands are shaking too much, beat the dust out of the rugs because it’s too hard for her. My cousin never has to lift a finger. When I arrive at her door, I’ve become so angry that I bang the door forcefully with a clenched fist. I hear Gertrude jump to her feet and shout. She rips the door open.
    “What on earth is going on?” she says, holding her hand on her heart.
    “Supper,” I growl.
    While we eat in silence, we listen to the evening news on the radio. There’s a severe storm warning, and all trawlers and small fishing vessels are advised to dock before midnight. But somewhere out there on the vast ocean is my dad, standing in the machinery room of the cargo ship
Orca,
dressed in dark blue overalls with oil on his hands and sweat on his brow. Maybe he’s listening to this broadcast, this very minute. At this moment, the voice of the news announcer is the only thing that connects us. Maybe he sits down and cleans the oil off his hands with a white cloth and is wondering why in the world he had to divorce Mom and leave me all alone in the turbulent ocean of life.

Vipera berus
glides very carefully from underneath the fallen leaves, long, thin, and soundless; only her cloven tongue twitches, her eyes cut in stone. Faster than the devil himself, she strikes with her jaw wide open, and the pretty little forest mouse is no longer among the living. It disappears slowly and surely down the throat of the snake. Its last message to the world a tiny twist of one of its hind legs. Maybe it’s just waving good-bye. The snake continues to swallow and swallow, and the mouse moves under the glistening skin until it has reached the middle of the snake. Then the stomach liquids start to dissolve the poor little thing, or rather to change it into energy, as the narrator puts it, so the snake can continue to glide around the world with her cold blood and stony eyes and kill some more. What are snakes for? I lie on my stomach in front of the TV and shoot a glance at my cousin who’s spread herself all over my mom’s TV chair, which once upon a time was Grandma’s radio chair. She dangles a long leg over the side of the chair, chews her gum, and flicks through a fashion magazine, turning the pages so fast that her bracelets jingle ceaselessly. She’s wearing a thin but wide sweater with a very low neck and the precious short skirt. Her thighs are bare. We haven’t said a word to each other since I entered the living room, turned on the TV, and lay down on the floor with my book,
Life and Creation.
She didn’t even ask me if I wanted to sit in the chair, although it was obvious that I was going to watch TV. It’s time to make her aware of some rules that apply in this home.
    “That’s Mom’s chair,” I say.
    “Really?” she says, not looking up from the magazine.
    “If